A very smart Revenue Leader, who had successfully competed against big-name players while working at small startups, had a few guiding principles about how his team should operate.
I had the pleasure of working with him for a fair bit and a recurring theme was this.
The secret to selling wasn’t how awesome your product was – not the tech – not the people behind the tech – not how much better your product was – not how fast you were iterating the tech.
“It’s not what you sell, but how you sell it.”
What you sell – product/service and more often than not, the conversation becomes stuck on feature-set and competitors
How you sell – the holistic buying experience across marketing, sales, product
In a commodity or saturated market, the buying experience will elevate your chances of winning
In a recent conversation with an entrepreneur who’s aiming to shake up the sales tech industry, we added one more qualifier to the above.
“It’s not what you sell, but how you sell it – and to whom you sell”
To whom you sell – there’s riches in niches – there’re a growing number of smallish companies completely owning a sub-market (geography, vertical) of a larger market that on the surface seemed to be crowded.
How you specialize to target a niche (big-enough) problem for a niche (big-enough) market can be your USP.
Example 1
Searching for Healthcare Billing solutions brings up a whole host of solutions on the usual software comparison websites. A 25-employee company, that offered such a solution, decided to double down on a small territory (a single state in the US) and persona (1-2 practitioner clinics) and have turned it into a ~2M USD ARR business with 90%+ retention.
~100% of new business is inbound as client referrals! Perhaps a story for another day.
Example 2
There’re a number of platforms that aim to democratize expertise in one way or form. And yet a young company offering consultancy services found a big enough niche to set up a successful business by focusing on Saudi Arabia and then within KSA, going from one persona to another, adding to their services portfolio.
TL;DR
– How you sell is more important than what you sell – and more often than not your product or marketing will be your prospect’s first interaction with your company. https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:6909025711605350400/
– To whom you sell is a more strategic decision, something that probably has the largest impact on your company’s success.